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Immersing ourselves in our clients’ worlds: A day in the life of a Morrisons in store foodmaker

Last week, with two of my Cirkle colleagues, we visited one of the Morrisons flagship stores (in Camden) to get stuck in to their fresh food production, and immerse ourselves as part of the Morrisons store team.

On arrival we were introduced to super friendly Charlie-Ann who works on the pizza counter/salad bar and who would be looking after us for the day. Before heading out on to the shop floor, she got all three of us kitted out in our new uniform for the day … personally, I think we rocked the stylish hat and hair net combo.

Morrisons is known for its Market Street and the way it prepares fresh food in-store and Charlie-Ann set us our first task of making some freshly made pizzas, which sounds easy, right? Who knew how difficult it would be to spread the tomato sauce evenly around the base… and I’m very glad no one was able to see us attempt to use the machine that cling films the pizza once we made them. That being said, they didn’t end up looking too bad and I felt very proud once they had been cooked and were put on display for a lucky customer to come along and take home one of my creations.

Once we had (kind of) mastered the art of making pizzas, we moved on to making pasta salad from scratch for the Salad Bar. Charlie-Ann’s colleague, Eleanor (aka. the salad queen in the Camden store), set us up with all the ingredients we needed to make the biggest batch of fresh tuna pasta salad you have ever seen. Apparently this is always a big hit for customers in the Camden store and ends up selling out by the time the lunch time rush is over.

The tuna pasta salad was ready to go so we started our efficient production-line of cheese and ham baguettes before having to make an early exit because of the dreaded “Beast from the East” snow storm which had well and truly hit London by then.

Working on the fantastic Morrisons consumer PR account every day at Cirkle, I thought I knew the brand pretty well but it’s safe to say getting out of the office and going to work in store for the day was hugely insightful – you can’t beat that first hand insight and experience of the brand, its fresh food production and how its customers shop in store. From our short but sweet time at Camden, we not only got to see how much time and effort goes in to making fresh food for customers every day, but also got the chance to meet so many incredible members of staff, some of whom had been working at the branch for a number of years.

The three of us left the Camden store with a new set of skills, a huge amount of appreciation for those who work in store and one thing is for sure… we felt extremely hungry after making all that delicious and fresh food!